Ginni Rometty

Ginni Rometty, born Virginia Marie Nicosia on July 29, 1957, in Chicago, Illinois, is an American business executive best known as the first woman to lead IBM. She became IBM’s president and CEO on January 1, 2012, later adding the role of chairman on October 1, 2012. After stepping down as CEO on April 1, 2020, she served as executive chairman until her retirement from IBM on December 31, 2020, closing a near-40 year career at the company.

Rometty grew up outside Chicago as the eldest of four children in an Italian-American family. When she was fifteen, her parents divorced and her father left. Her mother took on multiple jobs to support the family, while Rometty looked after the household in the evenings. In 1975 she entered Northwestern University in Illinois on a General Motors scholarship and interned with GM between her junior and senior years. She graduated with high honors in 1979 from Northwestern’s Robert R. McCormick School of Engineering and Applied Science, earning a bachelor’s degree in computer science and electrical engineering.

After graduation, Rometty worked for General Motors Institute in Flint, where she was responsible for application and systems development. In 1981 she joined IBM in Detroit as a systems analyst and systems engineer. Her first decade at IBM was spent in technical roles, working initially with clients in the insurance industry. She later worked with clients in banking, telecommunications, manufacturing, and health care, moved into sales during the 1990s, and joined IBM’s Consulting Group in 1991. By the late 1990s she was helping clients such as Prudential Financial with internet features.

A major mark on her IBM career came in 2002, when, as general manager of IBM’s global services division, she championed and helped negotiate IBM’s $3.5 billion purchase of PricewaterhouseCoopers’ consulting arm, Monday. The deal was described as the largest in professional services history and helped launch IBM further into services. Rometty then took on the work of integrating the two organizations. She later held senior posts in Global Business Services, global sales and distribution, and sales, marketing, and strategy. In those roles she helped push IBM toward services, software, analytics, cloud computing, emerging markets, and the commercial use of Watson, the Jeopardy!-playing computer.

As CEO, Rometty focused IBM on analytics, cloud computing, and cognitive computing systems. She worked to move the company away from unprofitable and commoditized lines, brokered partnerships with Apple, SAP, Twitter, and Box, and oversaw acquisitions and divestments between 2012 and 2016. Her leadership drew major recognition, including appearances on Bloomberg’s 50 Most Influential People in the World, Fortune’s “50 Most Powerful Women in Business,” Time’s 20 Most Important People in Tech, and Forbes’ America’s Top 50 Women in Tech. It also brought sharp criticism over executive compensation bonuses, layoffs, outsourcing, and 24 consecutive quarters of revenue decline.

Rometty’s public words often return to change, pressure, and learning under strain. Her line, “Growth and comfort do not coexist,” fits the outline of her life and career without smoothing over its hard edges: a Chicago childhood shaped by responsibility, an engineering education, decades inside IBM, and a run at the top during a difficult shift in the technology business. For readers of quotations, her words resonate because they come from someone who spent much of her career trying to move a large institution into new fields while facing the costs and scrutiny that came with that change.